The invention relates to a system and method of handling a plurality of communications between parties. Novel approaches to the presentation, storage and creation of both real-time and “store and forward” interactions are presented.
“Unified Communications” (UC) Systems are well known. These integrate a variety of disparate communication methods—including, but not limited to, telephony, cellular text messaging (“SMS”), web-chat (or “instant messaging”) and email—so that users need not access each one separately. Features of such systems typically include (a) forwarding of calls from one device, number or media to another, (b) a common message store, (c) access to a plurality of such channels from a single device or application.
A common approach to the presentation of messages of a variety of types has been to use an application that was designed originally for email. Voice recordings and video recordings are typically transported and stored as “attachments” using standards such as MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). The way in which a series of messages is presented to the user has changed little from the days when people checked their email once every few days and would converse with a relatively small number of people at a time.
Today, many workers carry email enabled telephones or other mobile communication devices. This encourages much more rapid and frequent responses from a wider set of individuals than before. However, most messaging applications continue to show a simple list of messages with a relatively small number of columns. The user can typically click on a column header to sort the list according to that column. While this allows messages to be seen chronologically or by subject it is not good at helping the user to grasp quickly what has been “said” by whom, to whom and when.
Furthermore, the common practice of including the text of a received email within the reply to that email leads to very long messages—much of which is duplicating one or more other messages already received. This makes it harder for the recipient to identify the new or changed information within each exchange of messages.
The list of addresses on an email is often shown in a very limited space—making it impossible to see the entire list without scrolling through it, a few at a time. This makes it difficult to appreciate who has seen the message and who has been added to or dropped from the list of recipients.
When messages include audio, this is often shown simply as an attachment—above, below or to one side rather than in the logical flow of the email. This is therefore difficult to place in context. It is also difficult to appreciate, at a glance, whether the attachment represents a few seconds or many hours of material.